Well, maybe you need to have my link listed 20 times in case someone misses it. LOL!

-L.

That happened because as I was trying to fix the problem, I edited one of my blue marked links to your site. I didn't know it would repeat EVERYWHERE!.

Goodness, I feel like a boob. It repeats on ALL sites using Blogrolling.

No, it was NOT a hacking to promote your site to the whole Blogosphere.

Have you seen my blog this morning? I got 50 comments from one guy calling me names because I messed up Blogroll somehow. I didn't even do anything to Blogroll. So that was you that did it. Tim ended up halting my server because it was starting to mess things up because people are still sending comments. Hopefully it'll stop soon.

-L.

Sorry if that comment sounded angry. I'm not upset. I didn't mean to sound like I was yelling at you or anything. We'll get it fixed.

-L.

Laura's computer is still getting hit with a lot of traffic right now, and I would like to ask whoever is sending comments over and over to please stop. She didn't do it and that should be enough for you.

That sucks. People are such SHITS. You didn't do it. It was a pure accident. I have e-mailed Blogrolling TWICE about this goof. I feel terrible about this. I have made an error before but it wasn't such a wide scale!

The thing is, I paid for Blogrolling. Many of the people that use the service have not.

tim, send a complaint to me. Keep them on record. I'd like to know if these shits are paying for the service or not.

You think I wanted this to happen? I feel so BAD about it. Horrible. You do not know how bad I feel right now. At the same time, I know I shouldn't feel bad. I was using a service I paid for and it went wonky on me and all the other users.

I just hope Jason, the guy that runs Blogrolling, has backups. Or can find the error that is causing this. This shouldn't have happened. However, I don't think I'm EVER going to prepend a link.

Awe Shawn, you must feel awful about all this and to the moron who's harrassing Laura... LEAVE HER ALONE...

and for that matter, LEAVE SHAWN ALONE before you even think of it!

whew... I feel better...

My fear now is being wrongly accused of hacking or Laura & Tim being wrongly accused of hacking when it was a simple mistake on my part. However, the Blogrolling site says there was a hack in the past 9 hours. I just know I didn't hack it to cause damage. All I was doing was changing a link.

It's not just one moron Tamm, Tim said that I got over 2,000 hits over the past 30 minutes. A lot of them were nice comments, but some of them were mean ones, including an email I got that was pretty threatening. I just hope that when this is all over, I don't still get that many hits at once, my computer can't take it. It's nice that so many people are saying they have another site to come visit now, but I don't have good enough content for all the visitors I'll probably be getting now.

-L.

Laura, don't worry. In a few days, this will all boil over, hopefully.

Don't worry about getting accused of this. Tim thinks someone that's been posting comments on my site is from Blogrolling, and they've been saying we didn't do anything. If it's not, he says that they look into it and see that we didn't do it. It'll be ok.

-L.

Well, yes, you'd be in the clear but I'm just worried that I won't and be accused of some grand thing that isn't in me. I would not hack anything to be malicious. That just isn't in my character.

However, part of this that is talking to me is the OCD I suffer from and I've always thought of the extreme and trying to brace that.

I don't understand, Shawn, how do you think that your editing a link in your blogrolls at blogrolling could have changed them ALL? Are you SURE it was you triggered it?

It's good to know what happened. It's a bit scary that BlogRolling's database can get screwed up like that! Would you care to publicise my blog, I could do with the traffic ;)

I am pretty sure it this burp occurred as I was editing a link. Actually, Laura's link was not the first link that repeated. It was another link I was trying to prepend to show it was not blogging at the moment. After seeing all my blogrolling links linked to the first site, I thought to edit a cloned link with a blue append. Laura's site is one of the three I have a blue append with. I editted a clone to Laura's site and it cloned Laura's site.

At first, I thought it affected just my blogrolls. I e-mailed Blogrolling about that. Then, as I was surfing the 'Net, I saw Laura's Blog linked on another site and then another site. As soon as I saw that, I e-mailed Blogrolling again stating I was SO SORRY about the whole accident.

I would NEVER purposely attack a site to cause damage. I don't like it when people do that and I try to live by the Golden Rule ("Do unto others as you would have them do uunto you."). All I can think I did wrong was use a double quote " instead of a single quote ' while prepending the original link. However, I have made that mistake before and all it did was screw up the link I was trying to edit, and nothing more.

I personally think the fault lies in the Blogrolling servers, and the fact that the hiccups happened when you were updating your links is just a coincidence. Don't worry about it, Shawn!

I wasn't around this morning to notice anything, but I did read your friend is being the target of angry webloggers. I hope they will have some common sense.

What if..... just as you were editing, whomever it was was hacking. You saved, came back and all the links were now Laura's Blog. Your edit was just caught in the crossfire.

I don't see how your edit could have taken all the blogrolls out of commission.

Hang in there.. don't blame yourself!

Penny, I welcome everyone to add a link to my my links database. However, I won't be able to make it as widespread as Laura's link.

Bea, Laura's acutally gotten a few good comments along with the bad ones and people are now blogrolling her.

Gina, I haven't thought of that scenario of it being hacked as I was working. I thought of a hack prior to my change but not during.

Part of me is laughing over this. I doubt Laura wanted to be this well known but now she is. There is even a thread about her on Metafliter. I knwo quite a few of you are coming from Brian's entry about the whole deal that he posted on Metafilter. He's the one that told me about it.

REVOLUTION LAURA... NOW!!!

I'm famous! Thanks Shawn!

Laura, I bet this is not the way you thought you would become famous. Everyone knows about your blog, now. In fact, this may be part of Blogosphere history.

Tim, take today as a sign that you should go work about being a net administrator. I think you did a great job handling this thing that was thrusted upon you.

Wow whatr a clusterf*ck!! Hope it all works out soon!!

Trish, it's all ok now. Blogrolling was restored to Saturday's copy and Jason is now working on it. Not the way we all expected our Monday to be but at least this was an accident and not something that was meant in malice.

Don't worry about it. People will understand it was a simple mistake and they'll get over it.

I am in awe that you were able to do that even though it was by accident!

Shawn... admit it... you did it for the hits! LOL ;) Just kidding, but I'm sorry you and your friend had to deal with so much crap. People depend too much on their blogs, it's insane!

Serenity, you're right. In a week, probably no one will remember this. I'm not in awe of it at all.

And Bea, I don't mind the hits so long as it clears up what happened and clears Laura's name. Maybe this was just a hard learned lesson for the whole blog world.

I linked to this post.

Once the word gets around that it was an accident (kudos for making that known!), people will calm down.

It surprises me a little that people thought Laura did this. I'm no rocket scientist, but when I saw my blogroll and followed the link, I thought, "Whoever did this picked on Laura at random."

I can't believe I know the person who messed up blogrolling. How funny. Well, I can see you would be totally embarassed and I feel really bad for poor Laura, but it was a short little mix-up with no harm done, really. Just a bit of a shock to open your blog and see stuff you didn't put there.

Really, I don't think you should blame yourself though or be embarrassed. Sounds more like a serious problem with blogrolling and you (and Laura) just happened to be the unlucky ones who got nailed with it.

I'd been telling the sites I saw that mentioned the blogrolling incident about what happened, before I even saw you post this. I feel really sorry for both of you. Though it is kindof wild to cause something that gets that much attention, I saw Laura's blog was #2 on Daypop citations.

Thank you, Commissar. The truth needs to be known.

Carrie, you're right, I shouldn't be embarrassed about the whole thing but I am in some ways. I'll be over it in a few days.

Chewie, thanks for spreading the news. She was #2? Wow.

Poor Laura! Poor Shawn. I didn't realize Shawn messed Blogrolling up. LOL I didn't think Laura was the one that hacked it. I just thought the hacker picked her site to list. I will list this entry on my site. Hopefully we can get the news out that this was all done by mistake. No one should be pissed at anyone. We all know there are bugs in many applications. I'm just glad you were able to point that out to Jason. ;) Go Shawn! Go Shawn!

Laura got some mean comments and e-mails about it.

I fear the belief of "Blogrolling was hacked. Kill the loser that did it" will still populate while I'm trying to get the word out is was an accident and accidents happen.

Yeah. It is so much easier for people to point the finger, than it is for them to forgive.

"Ain't that the truth!"

Oops! Well, I am very glad to hear it is not a malicious hacker. When I made my post "on wishing the hacker came down with a case of VD," I did not know the reason, or the why. I just blurted that out. :-)
I think it is noble that you came forward on it. And I am SO relieved that blogroll is fixed. Thanks for posting the link to here. It is good to know it was an accident.

You folks wanna yell at someone yell at me. There was a 1 in a million bug that Shawn found and screwed up the system. It was my fault for not plugging the hole and I apologize.

now now. We don't need any yelling. ;) You just wanted to teach everyone to back up their blogroll.

Ash, thankfully, everyone has been pretty civil about it here. I can’t vouch for the rest of the Internet.

Jason, thank you for commenting here! Hopefully, it will continue to spread that it wasn't a malicious thing. Again, I am so sorry about that entire mishap happening. You are one great dude! (Ok, giving you two thumbs up!)

Rilana, again, I wasn't mad at you per se, but the whole backlash about it. Many ugly things have been said about it all and many of those things, especially the stuff about Laura & Tim, did not need to be said at all. I didn't mind the anger and frustration about Blogrolling being down. That's totally understandable.

> " I didn't mind the anger and frustration about Blogrolling being down. That's totally understandable."

Is it, really? This whole thing just seems to illustrate, at least in my mind, that there are *way* too many people out there who take blogging *way* too seriously. And, ok, it's one thing to get upset if your own server (that you're paying to be up) randomly goes down... but to wish VD (and worse) on people because of a malfunction in a secondary service? Give me a break. This whole thing has been blown way out of proportion by people who, let's face it, maybe should spend less time in front of their computers and more in the real world.